What is a conspiracy theorist? A study in the subject

So, I wrote me a little piece on how the community is. Sort of an analysis. Had to do it for a college course, but I've done my best to write a
decent study on the subject on conspiracy and the people who believe some. We're not all crazy.

So here it is:

There are many different ways to see the world. There’s Person A’s view of it, Person B’s view of it, and the truth. I submerged myself in the
belly of the beast in regards to unconventional world views when I chose a particular discourse community. I was familiar with conspiracy, a broad
mish mash of folks looking to get their story heard. To be told that they’re not alone. To quote the X-Files, “That the Truth was out there.”

I sought out a locus of activity for these sorts of folks, stopping at a site called, “Above Top Secret”. Before I go into the details of the
site, let us consider the old adage, “What is in a name?” Contrary to naming scheme, there is no classified information upon the aforementioned
site. However, there are a wide variety of frenzied attempts at figuring out what goes on behind the scenes with those in the Government. They claim
that the “Powers That Be”, or the “Illuminati” pull the strings. Some of them go as far as to claim the entire site is a honey pot, that it
has been infiltrated by folks they call “Dis-Info Agents”. Now, a dis-info agent by their definition is someone who comes on the site and misleads
folks intentionally. However, most of the time, this cry of imposter is merely a response to skepticism.
I found myriads of individual lunacy, people indulging their paranoid fantasies. Yet, even within these groups with such discordant ideas, I found a
certain brotherhood. They were united in their distrust of authority. Most of them trusted neither side of the political community, a welcome
refresher in this day and age of partisan politics. However, most of them seemed to be taking quite a bit of their beliefs out of pop culture.

I thought of the X-Files. Of the genesis of the movement. Now, the X-files didn’t start it, but the resemblance in regards to the theories these
folks come up with are uncanny. The day to day unconnected episodes of creatures seems to have inspired many of the cryptozoologic myths that these
people believe. There was the constant onslaught of government conspiracy after government conspiracy, political intrigue, and back stabbing. Lights
in the sky over military test sites. As I watched The X-Files, it was like a message in a bottle from 90s paranoia and folk myth. It embodied an era
of ambiguous politics, the post Waco Siege, and Ruby Ridge environment. Anyone could tune in and pick up an episode on the television. Mulder and
Scully, two FBI Agents, one who wanted to believe, to find out the secrets of the government above all else, the other a seemingly eternal skeptic.
Now, this embodied a lot of conversations with those sorts of people to me. The doubters, and the true believers.

Now, this was not the only series of moving pictures with audio about conspiracies to influence the genre. There was a film by a man named John
Carpenter. Now, he had made other flicks, usually action movies, like “Big Trouble in Little China”, “Escape from New York”, even the first
“Halloween”. But in the 1990s, he was to release a film that would resonate with a very eclectic crowd indeed.

That film was titled, “They Live”. In it, a run down, economically downtrodden nation has been coopted from the inside out by a group of
snake-like aliens. However, they have the technology to make themselves appear human. In the film, one man, John Nada, played by Rod Piper, discovers
the plot, like Alice falling into Wonderland. Wearing sunglasses that allow him to see these creatures for what they are, he conducts a one man war
against these creatures. After an initial period of going solo, he meets up with a group of fellow rebels, people who also see them. However, it turns
out that they’ve been infiltrated. Soon, they are under attack, and the police slaughter everyone excluding the main character and his brother in
arms that he met while working in construction. They discover the media is in on it, the government too. That the world is less human than they
thought.

These ideas carried over into the pop culture of conspiracy theorists as well. Reptilian shapeshifters ruling the government? A deluded notion indeed.
Yet at the heart of it, these core beliefs were generally similar. A single person with unconventional ideas trying to take on a world that does not
believe. That the people in charge of us are not who they seem. A seemingly fanciful notion, until you take a look at Watergate, elections fraud, Abu
Ghraib, and the NSA spying program. The more I looked into the community, the less I asked myself why these people believed some of this stuff. The
more I looked into it, I asked myself, “Why not?” I stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared back into me.

It's a strange territory, that of the conspiracy theorist. Have to constantly take everything with a grain of sand. Mainstream media, especially, but
also the word of one's fellow theorists. I mean, I have my theories about the ill deeds of government and corporate interests, but I've also heard
some very far out theories about why things are the way they are.

Folks believing in aliens. Or folks believing in UFOs, but they're not aliens, they're demons. And by Jove, you've got every right to believe what
you want. This place wouldn't be nearly as interesting if everyone believed the same thing. I remember after Sandy Hook happened, that was all anyone
was talking about. And it was so boring. It was possible it was a conspiracy, possibly not, but what irked me was how homogenous and uniform the
threads were. (Let's not turn this into Sandy Hook chat)

The fact that we have like, twenty differing theories about who did 9/11, how, and why, I think to be a good thing. It shows that people are at least
trying to think. Trusting the party line is for chumps.

Personally, I find this current situation of China being our biggest trade partner to be very reminiscent of Orwell's vision of the future that he
put forth in "1984". We were never at war with the communists. We were always at war with the Middle East.

When Richard Nixon is in comparison, higher up on the sliding scale of honesty vs dishonesty in regard to politicians these days, it's a harbinger of
something incredibly wrong with the system. When swine run free in congress, unheeded, unconnected to the consequences of their actions, there's
something wrong. The 27th Amendment, which guarantees these pigs of men their wages regardless of performance, was a betrayal of the people. It was
the sort of legal trickery that only someone as slimy as a lawyer, and as egotistical as a politician would dream up.

We seek the truth, here. There's no radio personality shouting every dissenting opinion down into the depths of uncivility and discord. Just a wide
variety of talkative sorts with notions that the mainstream would call insane. If not trusting what they blather about on the news is crazy, then
that's me. But here, we're not alone. Solidarity, that's the ticket. Even in so called lunatic notions, solidarity.

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